Beau Miles walked 88 km in 29 hours, from his home in the countryside to a workshop he was presenting in the city. The topic of the workshop: “I chose to walk to work, and this is why.”

He is such a compelling filmmaker and storyteller. What emerges from this film, among other things, is the value of experiencing the same-old same-old in unfamiliar ways so as to see it anew all over again, a helpful ethos during a time when few of us wander more than a few blocks from home.

Don Jardine has been posting up a storm on his Our Island Climate site of late, including an item today about a 1963 lightning strike on Trinity United Church, our neighbour just down Prince Street.

The full story from the September 3, 1963 edition of The Guardian, written by George Condon:

Trinity Church Damaged By Lightning Saturday

Lightning struck Trinity United Church in Charlottetown with the force of an explosion at the height of a storm Saturday and left damage in its wake affecting the entire city.

Trinity itself suffered damage which will run into several hundreds of dollars while neighbouring homes were bombarded by flying brick and pierced by lightning.

Cars in the street were battered while power lines and transformers were burnt to a crisp, causing power failure through most of the city and surrounding districts.

The fury of the lightning was so great persons in most parts of the city, some a half-mile or more away, though[t] the bolt had struck in their immediate vicinity.

The storm began without great fury. It was not until approximately 3:30 p.m. Saturday that it struck with all its force. The sudden crash of thunder was heard for miles while the flash of lightning ran from Southport to the western section of the city. Almost an inch of rain drenched the area at the same time.

DEBRIS SCATTERED

The lightning bolt which struck the church hit with such force that brick-chips from the chimney at the centre of the east wall were found as far away as Grafton Street. The chimney itself disintegrated while lightning tore through the building and out the other side.

The Henry Wooldridge residence, next door at 203 Sydney Street was pelted by falling brick and sustained three holes in the roof and broken windows as a result. The lightning passed right through the house shattering a salt shaker held by Mrs. Wooldridge.

Damage to the Church included the destruction of the rear chimney and nearby brickwork, smashed wall boards and shingles, a rafter split tom the peak of the roof to the eve, loosened bricks and stones on the walls, and curling of the lead flashings at the inside ridge of the roof.

Damage to the church’s electrical system is still undetermined but it is known that many fixtures were shattered, wires were burnt and fuses blown. There were no services in the Church on Sunday.

Sidney Street resembled a war-time scene with great chunks of rubble and broken glass lying about.

M[r]s. Henry Wooldridge, standing over the stove in her kitchen next door, thought there had been an atomic blast. “The windows started breaking and the lightning came right in the back door and out the front,” she said.

As the lightning passed through her kitchen it struck the salt shaker in her hand, scattering the fragments in all directions and stunning her for a second.

LUCKY TO BE ALIVE

“It seemed to come in through the back door and over to the stove. The whole stove was sort of blue and a big flash came down from the light socket. We are lucky to be alive,” she said.

Damage to the Wooldridge home included broken windows, holes in the door, loss of power, including the destruction of the electric motor in their stove, and piles of rubble in the yard.

A hugh slab of concrete missed the house by inches and crushed a wooden tool box Mr. Wooldridge had in the yard.

Sarah VanIderstine, 83, who lives across the street at 200 Sidney, left her chair for only a moment, but when she returned there was broken glass all over the floor and a brick was laying on the chair.

CARS DAMAGED

A Volkswagen car belonging to Roger MacLaren, 205 Sidney Street, had the roof pushed in and the rear window of broken by falling brick. Fred Roberts lost the rear window of his car. A New Brunswick car and at least one other vehicle also received damage.

A gaping hole appeared in the roof of 205 Sydney St. where a bolt of lightning passed through.

Power was disrupted for hours as wires in the immediate vicinity were down and a transformer in the Federal Building was damaged. Power company linemen responded to over a hundred calls in and around the city.

Lightning was seen to be dancing along wires, the top of the new Confederation Memorial structure, and Woolworth’s in the city, and as far away as the Southport Country Club.

Residents saw the lightning which struck the church signalled the end of the storm here.

The story was accompanied by this scene of Sydney Street:

I have taken great comfort from attending the monthly grief support group sessions offered by Hospice PEI. As Catherine was living with cancer, and my thoughts would turn toward how I would live on afterward, it never occurred to me that the company of other people, united by grief, would be part of it; if my thoughts did turn to such things, more often than not I would picture myself running as fast as I could the other direction.

I wrote to a friend this week that a year ago I was acting as though I could “treat grief like it was an extracurricular course that I could skip,” and that I was “acting like I was some great exception to the rule of how these things work.” Later I wrote to my family that last spring it felt like I was  “trying to outrun grief.” And both were true: the template I had for grieving was all about “moving on” or “powering through,” and I truly did think, in my heart of hearts, that if I buckled down hard enough I could skip the usual grieving rigamarole and get on with life.

I was wrong.

And, fortunately, in mid-May I came to my senses, and reached out for support. I stopped running.

In the months since I’ve found support in many different places in addition to the grief support group: from Oliver, from my mother, from my brothers, from friends, from my psychologist, from my social worker, in talking to others who are grieving, in podcasts and books, and, mostly recently, on Facebook. Through all this my conception of grief has changed completely from “something I need to power through” to “a new part of who I am and always will be.”

That’s a hard thing to write in a way that doesn’t make it sound like “I will now and forever be sad,” especially if, as I once did, you think of grief and sadness as synonyms. What I mean by it is that I have been cracked open in a substantial and undeniable way, and that crack–a wound is one way of thinking about it–will always be with me. But the wound need not be disabling, and the wound need not lead me to being stuck, or being jaded or being depressed (although, no doubt, it can, and I’ve felt those tugs as much as anything else I’ve felt). 

All of which leads me to men.

Although the monthly grief support group is open to all, and although there have certainly been other men who’ve attended by times, they have, especially recently, been few and far between. On a personal level this doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of my attending, as long as I remember to listen mindfully and to stanch my natural inclination to fill silences (the “promise” that’s read at the beginning of every session is so helpful, in part, for its role in that reminding). But every time I find myself as the only man in a support group I cannot help but worry about the other grieving men, my brothers-in-grief, and whether they might be stuck where I was, trying to power through.

I am afraid for them, and I am afraid for those around them, because I’ve learned enough to understand that grief ignored, grief bottled, grief contained, grief powered through, has the power to leak or explode in harmful, dangerous ways.

Everyone’s grief is different and we each need to find the path that works for us; there’s no way to prescribe a universal path, a universal timetable, a universal result. But I have been well trained by my lifetime growing up in western society that, as a man, my emotions are to be constrained and managed, that admitting fallibility is weak and to be avoided at all costs, that anyone atypical needs to be culled from the social herd, that self-reliance is noble, and asking for help is something you only do when the water is well and truly pouring through the roof. If even then.

I am so grateful that I am finding my way through this in a way that allows me to be mindful of that education-in-masculinity and to start to unpack it. In this I owe a great debt to Oliver, who we tried so hard to raise with that mindfulness, and who’s atypicalness, fortunately, extends to his regard for gender; to my trans and gender-non-binary friends who’ve shared profound insights into what they’ve learned as they’ve confronted the world on their terms; to the women I’ve listened to and shared with around the grief support table who’ve said, beyond anything else “we see you there, it’s okay.”

All I can do in the face of this, knowing what I’ve learned, is to write about my own path with hopes that it will, at least a little, open up the atlas of what’s possible for others that follow on.

I missed in January that The Peter and Oliver Podcast passed its 15th anniversary.

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of Oliver over the last 20 years, but none captures as much of him, and of us, as these audio snapshots of our life.

Remember the Jacobean Cacao Husk Chocolate Tea that I mentioned in November? Well it’s back in stock at Riverview Country Market after a long time out of stock.

“You got more of the Jacobean tea in stock!”, I exclaimed yesterday.

“Yah, we brought it in mostly for you,” my smiling cashier revealed.

So I feel an extra responsibility to encourage you all to pop out and buy some. It’s not cheap, but it is the perfect cold-winter-night drink.

If you’ve got a spare hour this weekend, you could do worse than listening to the first hour of the last Morningside. I remember it like it was yesterday, in part because I listened to it with Catherine and her parents while stuck in an hours-long traffic jam en route to the opening of the Confederation Bridge.

Receiver Brass Shop, understandably given the snapbacks and lockdowns, cancelled Thursday Pizza Pasta tonight, throwing the responsibility for pizza provision back to me. This pizza fought me all the way, but, somehow, it all worked out.

On Zoom this afternoon I talked about my 2019 The Government That Swallowed a Pond presentation with Josh MacFadyen’s geospatial humanities class at the University of PEI.

When Josh introduced me, he referred to me as “Friend to the Humanities,” which I thought a lovely way of describing my relationship to academia. I may have to produce business cards with that title.

Josh and his students were uncommonly engaged, and we had as much discussing as I did presenting; I enjoyed that.

We emerged from “Modified Code Red” into what I keep referring as “snapback,” but is actually called “circuit breaker,” and I used the opportunity to get a haircut. It had been 104 days since the last one.

Every haircut I emerge looking just a little bit more like my mother’s father; as he was among the gentlest people I’ve ever known, I focus on the hope that I inherit his demeanour as well as his widow’s peak.

As part of an orgy of stationery buying from Sumthings of Mine in the late fall, I acquired a Chinese Mini Traditional Calendar:

Palm-size Chinese lunar traditional for the 365 days of the year!

Lunar calendar (农历) is a great creation with its inventions of the intercalary month and the 24 solar terms. It is still used for marking traditional East Asian holidays such as the Chinese New Year, the Duan Wu Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Winter Solstice Festival and many more. In astrology, it is used for choosing the most auspicious date for a wedding or the opening of a building.

This calendar is a tear off calendar, which you could tear down each page day-by-day easily. After tearing the pages off, you could store them on your pages, or use them to adorn your outgoings or any collage artworks.

All that in a single calendar!

I’m still sorting out what each part of each day’s markings mean:

• The characters under WEDNESDAY are Wednesday in Chinese.
• Rejab is the seventh month of the Islamic calendar.
• It’s the year 1442 on the Islamic calendar, which appears in the bottom right.
• The 19 in the bottom left is the age of the Moon.

If you know more than that, please let me know.

(In the background: a newly-acquired Ferris Wheel Press fountain pen sitting in a 3D printed phone holder and two halves of a 3D printed Earth).